Companies who love Roadmunk

“Roadmunk helps each of my product managers remain focused on the right mix of transformative efforts and backlog items for each of their products.”

Lauren Kaeppner is a product team leader at Staples. She realized, a couple of years ago, that she needed a better roadmapping tool than Excel. Lauren wanted to paint a clearer picture of what her team was up to—specifically how each product manager’s tasks were helping to push their product forward.

Lauren typed “roadmap applications” into Google and found Roadmunk. She signed up for a free trial started roadmapping right away. Lauren liked to the tool so much that she quickly enlisted ten of her product managers to use Roadmunk, too.

“Adopting Roadmunk into our Product Management organization has transformed how we manage our products.” Lauren said. “Roadmunk helps each of my product managers remain focused on the right mix of transformative efforts and backlog items for each of their products.”

Roadmaps were shared with different teams and stakeholders across the organization. The visibility and clarity into how products would evolve—and the ease in which roadmaps could be shared—was a welcome change.

“We’re positioned to be transparent at a moment’s notice. We can walk stakeholders through our product strategy live, right in the app,” Lauren said.

The roadmaps created by Lauren and her product managers were presented to the the executive team. They were so impressed by Roadmunk’s visualization and sharing capabilities that they encouraged other departments to adopt the tool, too. And they did. Roadmunk is used by a variety of teams across Staples to share plans and align on what’s coming up next.

“We chose Roadmunk because it is simple but powerful. Our product team uses the platform to communicate high level planning to engineering and other stakeholders.”

Tulip Retail is a Toronto-based startup. The company has found a lot of traction with its mobile platform—it was built to help retail store associates create amazing shopping experiences for their clients. Catalogs, purchase history and checkout can be accessed within the app from anywhere in the store.

Tulip’s product management team uses Roadmunk to stay organized and keep the rest of the company in the loop.

“We chose Roadmunk because it is simple but powerful” Jan Kotowski, Head of Product, said. Jan brought Roadmunk into Tulip having used the platform at a previous company.

Jan and seven of his product managers use Roadmunk for high-level planning and to align product and engineering stakeholders in meetings about what will be included in upcoming releases. Their day-to-day tactical organization lives in Jira.

“Roadmunk sits on top of our other software. We don’t use it for granular planning and it's not for tactical execution. We use Jira for that, but Roadmunk shows the big picture of where our product is going,” Jan said. “It's very hard to get a holistic, high-level that view out of Jira or any other task management tool.”

“Roadmunk enables and facilitates collaborative decision making and investment planning.”

Carfax’s goal is to help each of their customers make smart decisions throughout the entire life cycle of shopping for, buying, owning and selling a car. They have a suite of eight products that service each of these steps—and they all integrate with each other in various ways.

On top of that, product and technology initiatives are bucketed into three main categories: consumer experience, dealer experience and enterprise capabilities.

It can get a little complicated.

This messiness was compounded by the product team’s use of Excel and spreadsheets to build roadmaps.

Now, the Carfax team stays organized by using Roadmunk as a portfolio management tool. Their high-level consumer, dealer, and enterprise roadmaps help the team make decisions about where to invest time and resources. The roadmaps are also used to communicate deliverables to all stakeholders and executive team members.

"Roadmunk enables and facilitates collaborative decision making and investment planning. It’s also incredibly valuable in terms of awareness—it shows what's happening, when it's happening, who is doing it,” Aaron Hall, Director of Project Services, said. “The role delineation is also key so that we can easily have folks who own and manage versus those who just review."